There’s a photo from my childhood where I, a 5-year-old film snob in the making, am standing on my father’s feet as his relatively giant hands hold mine aloft and we walk together, foot on foot, step in step. This memory came to mind as I watched The Watchers, Ishana Night Shyamalan’s feature-length debut, a movie so in step with her father’s style that it’s less like she’s walking in his footsteps and more like she’s walking on his feet.
Based on the novel of the same name by author A. M. Shine, The Watchers is a bog-standard puzzle-box thriller reminiscent of the worst parts of Lost and the lesser M. Night movies. Pieces of the puzzle are deliberately withheld and then drip-fed to simulate suspense because, once they’re pieced together in full view, they either make little sense or fail to live up to the mystery promised by the individual elements.
Dakota Fanning plays Mina, an American living in Ireland whose sole characteristic is that she feels guilty for the death of her mother 15 years ago. Because she works at a pet store, she has to transport a rare parrot somewhere, which provides a lazy sounding board for her exposition and a flimsy motivator for her to get stuck in the magical woods of the eponymous watchers.
Once lost in the woods, a mysterious old woman (Olwen Fouéré) runs from her, then leads her to a building, and then urges her to run inside while counting down dramatically from 5. The one-room brutalist structure is sparsely furnished with mid-20th century furniture, lit by orange overhead lights, and has a floor-to-ceiling two-way mirror covering one wall. So mysterious!
Every night, the four people in the room must stand and look at the mirror so that the “watchers” can watch them. I know, mysterious, right? There are also rules that Mina and her fellow captives must follow, because of course there are. They must never go out at night, they must never go past a certain perimeter during the day (marked with overly ominous signs saying “point of no return”), and they must never explore the giant holes in the ground around the building, presumably where the watchers hide during the day. Wonder if they’ll break any of those rules . . . .
Formally, Ishana Shyamalan shares her father’s talent. The Watchers has all the hallmarks of a respectable A24-style horror film, but it suffers from the Shyamalan effect, where the capital “M” Mystery takes precedence over everything else, even logic. Oh, and the dialogue is pretty awful as well (not her father’s strong suit either). That her father also produced the film cannot be ignored, and one wonders if Ishana might one day find her own wings if she were to get out from under his.
